Thoughts from the interface of science, religion, law and culture

After spending several years touring the country as a stand up comedian, Ed Brayton tired of explaining his jokes to small groups of dazed illiterates and turned to writing as the most common outlet for the voices in his head. He has appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show and the Thom Hartmann Show, and is almost certain that he is the only person ever to make fun of Chuck Norris on C-SPAN.

EVENTS

The Conservapedia of Fact Checking

There’s a new site called Conservative Fact Check that will likely provide a good deal of entertainment. The creator of the site, some guy named Chuck Rogers that few people have heard of, says it is “dedicated to providing a conservative alternative to enormously liberal-biased fact checking sites like snopes.com, factcheck.org, and politifact.com.”
And they have “definitive proof” that Politifact is biased, which is going to crack you up. Their proof is that they added up all the times Politifact had called a political claim a “pants on fire” lie and — shock and horror — conservatives were more likely to receive that designation than liberals. They don’t dispute a single one of those “pants on fire” calls; in fact, they don’t even discuss any of them. All that matters to them are the numbers.

To have any semblance of fairness, PolitiFact should play it 50/50 and present an equal number of lies from both sides. They clearly are not concerned with any pretense.

Well that might be true, if both sides lied equally often. Do they? Rogers does not even make an attempt at such an argument. Well, he does make this very amusing argument:

The results are, sadly, not surprising. But the situation is grave. PolitiFact (and other supposedly unbiased fact-checking sites) paint Mitt Romney as a serial liar. They also unfairly tarnish Michele Bachmann as a liar, when anybody who follows her already understands that many of her statements aren’t meant to be truthful in the first place — she simply says what she feels.

Seriously? That’s your argument for why it’s unfair to call Michele Bachmann a liar, because she isn’t trying to make truthful claims in the first place? Brilliant. Absolutely freaking brilliant. Andrew Schlafly would be so proud. This site may rival Conservapedia for the number of gut laughs per visit.

Comments

Let’s see how this works, then. Is he saying that if Snopes was a bit less lefty, they wouldn’t be quite so certain that the:Stolen car is returned with theatre tickets inside to lure away the owners while their home is burgled.

Is perhaps true?

Or perhaps what he’s saying is that the whole duality of true/false is too simplistic. But, no, he couldn’t be saying that because he’d have just blown his entire epistemology out of the water.

They also unfairly tarnish Michele Bachmann as a liar, when anybody who follows her already understands that many of her statements aren’t meant to be truthful in the first place — she simply says what she feels.

In other words, it’s unfair to call a person who says untrue things a liar.

Though granted, you can split hairs about whether a falsehood told recklessly because the speaker didn’t feel like researching the truth constitutes a deliberate deception or just willful negligence. Doesn’t really matter too much to me, since either way, the goal is to stop the spread of falsehood by way of negative reinforcement. If you don’t want to be called a liar, do some basic fact checking to make sure you’re telling the truth before you say it on national television or whatever.

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Just yesterday I found out about a blog post asking people to prove the author wrong without resorting to logical fallacies. Someone stopped by to whine that she was unfairly limiting their options.

So Michele Bachmann isn’t a lair, because she didn’t meant to be truthful in the first place? So Michele Bachmann isn’t a lair, because she meant to lie. So since she meant to lie, and therefor she meant to be a lair, and since she meant to lie and therefor isn’t a lair, does that mean that Michele Bachmann fails at being a liar? …. Head explodes.

They have an article titled “American Hero: Sheryl Nuxoll” she’s proposed the same ditzy thing the guy on WND proposed about the electoral college needing a quorum. You had an article here about it. There’s no fact checking! They just call her a hero.

They also unfairly tarnish Michele Bachmann as a liar, when anybody who follows her already understands that many of her statements aren’t meant to be truthful in the first place — she simply says what she feels.

I see, she is delusional rather than dishonest. While neither should be acceptable qualities in an elected representative, if those are my only choices I think I would prefer dishonest, at least that retains the possibility of being rational underneath the dishonesty. Unfortunately Michele Bachmann clearly appears to be both.

Big news from Dean Chambers, of Unskewed Polls fame: voter fraud has been found in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Florida… Many people have suspected voter fraud, but it looks like Dean Chambers has found the smoking gun. For complete details of his analysis, visit his new site, barackofraudo.com.

There’s no analysis of the claim whatsoever. Great fact-checking job, there.

I would love to check out the original paper on the determination of a ‘liberal bias’ in the so-called MSM from a few years back. As I recall, their determination was premised on the ratios of positive/negative coverage of liberals/conservatives on a ‘random’ number of days.

I’m betting that even those folks were working on the notion that all politicians engage in equal amounts of dishonest activity.

It is implied, but never stated, that the NOAA really is taking temperature tests in the middle of the oceans. It’s more likely that they are doing some averaging of their own; doing some linear calculations based on temperature readings at coastal points on either side of each ocean, and then extrapolating the temperatures at the points between them. The flaw in their science is the fact that oceans are cooler than land — so if this were a map of actual temperatures, the oceans would be blue… and the map wouldn’t be nearly so dramatic.

They also unfairly tarnish Michele Bachmann as a liar, when anybody who follows her already understands that many of her statements aren’t meant to be truthful in the first place — she simply says what she feels.

Yeah, this is a real problem. As an ideology starts to lose touch with reality, it becomes self-reinforcing. If purportedly unbiased sources have only bad things to say about your ideology, you could realized your ideology is wrong (hah!), or you could decide those sources were biased after all.

In other words, if your ideology is wrong enough, then it becomes impossible to identify unbiased sources.

That site definitely exemplifies a Poe, where I could imagine someone stupid enough to say those things. However, this quote pushed me over the edge:

Donald Trump delivered what should have been a crushing blow to the Obama campaign just weeks before the election, by exposing Obama’s unwillingness to release his college transcripts. As a result, $5 million — which could have gone to any charity that Obama had chosen — stayed in Trump’s bank account.

As a comedian and satirist (albeit one very low on the totem pole), I might know a thing or two about spoofs. This site is too self-aware to be anything but a parody. The fact that is site came out after the election lends support to my position, too.

The oceans ARE getting warmer in certain places. Those places are where the huge, underwater FEMA labor camps are set up, thousands of feet down, on the sea floor. They are mining manganese nodules for Obama’s Lizardian Overlords. Mars needs women; the LO’s need manganese, LOTS of it, to carry out their breeding programs! True Story!!

It might not be done by an actual conservative but I’m not sure I’d call it satire either. My guess would be someone who doesn’t care really but wants ad revenue. The crap on there is mostly consistent with the various intellectually lazy talking points the right puts out. The tone and language is the same across articles so I suspect it is just one person assembling the pages.

As to politifact, I gave up going to the site (before maddow did a few pieces on them) due to its right wing spin. They may not support Bachmann but they aren’t equal in judgment.

Harry Frankfurt’s essay “On Bullshit” describes the same distinction
that Rogers is making. According to Frankfurt, If you know what the truth
is and say it, you’re truthful; if you know that the truth is and say something else anyway, perhaps because the truth doesn’t suit you, you’re a
liar; if you’re ignorant and/or apathetic towards the truth and say whatever suits you, you’re worse than a liar – you’re a bullshitter.

It might be amusing to have a fact-checking site that ran with this idea
and, rather than place statements on a truth/lie scale, place them on a
truth/lie/bullshit triangle.

I can’t tell if it’s satire. It’s extremely stupid, but it’s stupid in a way that is perfectly consistent with contemporary right-wing beliefs and cognitive deficiencies. Which is to say, if it’s fake, I don’t think satire is the right word for it. Mimicry is more like it.

“This site may rival Conservapedia for the number of gut laughs per visit.”

Both sites should do the responsible thing, and feature the warning banner:

WARNING: Exposure to these articles have been associated with explosive spit-takes. Violent epileptic fits of laughter may propel users from their seats, resulting in serious injury. Users are strongly cautioned to avoid simultaneous consumption of beverages and our content.

The Bush administration did not find Osama bin Laden simply because they weren’t trying too hard. If they wanted to, they could have, but shortly after September 11th, the Bush administration wisely turned its focus to the conflict in Iraq for the ultimately successful hunt for WMDs. Due to the Bush administration’s efforts, Saddam Hussein was deposed and could not use his stockpile of WMDs against Israel or the US, and the Taliban and Al Qaeda were driven from Iraq.

This article should lay to rest any question about whether the site is satire:

I hate to break it to you, but that twisted nonsense you quoted accurately reflects what a significant portion of people on the right really do believe.

I don’t know if it’s “satire” or not (if so, it really skirts the traditional meaning and purpose of satire), but it’s neither here nor there when people point to various inanities on that site and say, “There’s no way anyone could be that stupid.” Sadly, they are. We have Conservapedia as an exemplary model of deranged but completely serious right-wing fantasia.

The spin machine was out quickly on this one: after many bloggers watched in horror as Michelle Obama said “all this for a flag?” on live TV, deaf people came to the consensus that she was probably just saying “amazing how they fold that flag.”

This one just takes common sense. Who would you trust — educated bloggers, including James S. Robbins of the Washington Times — or some deaf people, who have no political experience, a wide range of education, and may be Obama supporters?

@23:
Followed your link. One of the articles was on the number of people in the US who die from no health insurance each year. The numbers they used were 25-50k. They linked to Wikipedia for the population of the US, which they list as 206 million. Yet wikipedia lists the US population at 314 million. How can you provide a link to a site, but get your numbers that wrong?

Here’s a link to a page that shows you how. I’ve bookmarked this link. I also usually keep this page open in a window with other pages I’ve got open where I might comment, e.g., Ed’s blog posts that are getting active comments. I then subscribe to the permalink at the bottom after the comments start to die out so I can close that page at some point without missing out on subsequent comments.

Then when I want to link to a webpage in a comment, I just copy and paste the the tags as they’re formatted on the afore-linked page into the box where we type our comments. At that link’s page, it’s the line which contains the comment, Visit W3Schools.com! I then copy and paste over that line’s URL and comment with the URL and comment I’ll be publishing in my comment post just like I’ve done here.

There may more efficient ways to do this, like memorizing the line and just typing it out, having an app which lets you store multiple items in your clipboard, or a key-stroke shortcut macro that inserts text. This is just the way I do it.

Definitely a parody. They have an article titled “2012 May Break Record for Fewest Tornadoes,” which reads, in its entirety:

While the “climate scientists” continue to argue that extreme weather conditions are evidence of global warming, little attention is paid to the fact that weather is actually getting better.

It includes a link to an article which says, in it’s sub-head, that the “fewest tornadoes” is due, in large part, to drought conditions. No one could possibly be that self-unaware…could they? (Yes, I’m aware of the whole “real stupidity is often indistinguishable from a pretense of it” thing)
And, to cap it off, the illustration chosen to show “that weather is actually getting better” is the flying-cow still from the movie Twister. I suppose that could be a subtle dig at climate-change; but it’s hard to reconcile that kind of subtlety with the blatant idiocy of linking to an article that undermines the whole point of the article being linked from.